Our remaining time in Monteverde: Highlights, horse riding, zip lining and cloud forest

Well we have now left the wonderful mountain town of Monteverde. It was lovely to spend a month there.

Here is a pic of Beverly's lovely little cabin.




Some of my highlights were:

• buying fresh milk and cheese from our neighbouring milk factory (it appears the products of which are sold all over Costa Rica)
• breathing in the fresh mountain air and being surrounded by forest (lots of oxygen!)
• living in a cooler climate for awhile
• living in Beverly's fully equipped cabin
• cosy evenings in, watching Beverly's DVD's; 'It's always sunny in Philadelphia', and then our favourite; 'Mad Men' - we became avid fans and watched two series of it (and are on the lookout for the third). Man it was a good look into life in the 60's.
• loads of reading
• participating in the carrera creativa (a big school fundraising walk/run)
• the opportunity to teach in a Costa Rican school
• meeting some great staff and children
• some very fun times with my grade 1 and 2 class (would love to add photos of them but don't have parental consent!)
• taking my class on a big hike uphill into the forest to the school kiosk.
• walking everywhere
• taking the school bus
• holidaying for a week in a real house (Cindy's)
• finally replacing our camera after many conversations, emails and often dead end excursions to pay the tax and pick it up. The joy of a camera in hand in Costa Rica (thanks Snowda).
• morning runs up to cloud forest reserve
• Costa Rican coffee from Cindy's (loaned) Costa Rican style coffee sieve - yum!  
• Three great excursions (see below)

This is the bus stop at the end of our road (it's raining as we wait for our zip line shuttle to arrive).

We went on a few excursions:

The first one was on the Friday of our 'holiday' week - a trip with Sabine's Smiling Horses. It was awesome! The horse was much more comfortable and easier to ride than I recall from past experiences. As far as I could work out Costa Rican speeds are - walk, trot, gallop, RUN! I know ours as walk, trot, canter, gallop, so I got a fright when he said, "Quieres gallopar?" (do you want to gallop). I wasn't too sure about that! Once I worked out what speed a gallop was we 'galloped' some, which was very fun - the best bit actually - after the first gallop I wanted to do it more and more!

Alvaro, our guide, took us to a wonderful secret spot. It was so beautiful - like a NZ mountain stream BUT WARM - oh my gosh what an experience! There was even a natural slide - check out the pics.

It was Snowdon's first time on a horse, and he LOVED it. On the way back he said, "how much is a horse?" I said, "lots". He said, "Really? More than a car". "Hmmm maybe not?" That got me thinking. I'd never considered buying a horse to get around on (when we were all younger our family borrowed the local pony 'Adam' for a few weeks, who loved to drop his shoulder on us and send us flying over the front - a very 'valuable' experience when considering owning a horse!).

THANK YOU TO DON AND SUE - YOUR WEDDING GIFT SPONSORED THIS TRIP - AND WE LOVED IT!

The second excursion, was on the Sunday, the last day, of our 'holiday' week. It was a canopy tour - a zip line through the cloud forest. It was incredible!

The guides were really 'fast paced'.  The main guide gave a 5 min speech on the main points.  Then he said OK we're off.  Then that was pretty much it.  They we're really good at hooking us onto the lines all the time and kept us safe, but man it was all go.  No time to think about what you were doing (which was probably a good  thing - we were soooooo high up in the air).  It was really wet, and quite hard to hear (with hoods over our ears) and see much.  As we were in the cloud forest it was very cloudy.  The guides would race past us, click themselves in and jump off the platform - which looked crazily fast to us but I guess that's what they do every day.  Then one would stay with us to click us in.  They had it very well organized.  Each time they'd tell us if we needed to 'break' by pulling down with our hands at the end or not.  No time for questions!  They'd say feet up - and we we're off!

It was incredibly exhilarating hurtling through the air on the zip line.  At times we were like Avatar zipping right through the tree tops, other times we could see the trees just below us, and once we couldn't see anything at all, just cloud.  That was my highlight, zipping through the air, way way way up high, knowing that I was up that high, but disappearing into cloud and not being able to see ANYTHING ELSE. Oh my gosh - it took some trust!

There were 11 lines (usually 13 but 2 were unsafe in the rain and we couldn't use them that day but no one minded, we had plenty of fun).  Eventually our main guide said that he had a surprise for us.

Tarzan swing.  Well I've been saying that our guides were fast paced, but this was the 'finest' part.  We went up to the top of the Tarzan swing.  The guide buckled us in.  Then...........HE PUSHED US OFF!  I couldn't believe it!  I imagined the contrast with NZ - you'd never get pushed off.  I'm sure our laws wouldn't allow it?  You have to get your own legs to send you off whatever it is.  It was great being pushed off - no thinking (second thoughts) needed - no time for that, you're already off!  Check out the pic of the Tarzan swing - they kept yelling something at us so that they could catch us after we'd swung a few times but no one could hear them (and they hadn't told us previously) so they had to yell it at every person who did the Tarzan swing (some chose not to).  I don't think anyone could follow these instructions in the end!

This was a once in a lifetime experience for us (one guy on our trip had done it many times).  Hurtling through the Costa Rican Forest on a piece of wire.  What an invention, what an experience, what a trip. 

THANK YOU TO THE MASONS WHO SPONSORED MY ZIP LINE, AND JEEVAN WHO SPONSORED SNOWDON'S.  AS YOU CAN READ - IT WAS WONDERFUL!

Our last excursion was a free one (no sponsors required)!  Cindy had organised a school letter for us (teachers and their family are given access for free).   It was a visit to the Cloud Forest Reserve.  We'd been meaning to do it our whole time in Monteverde but only just fit it in at the end. It was lovely - I'll let some photos tell the story this time.  Although we all know that photos never really capture the ambience of a place......